Overshadowed by the events in Ukraine and Iraq, the Israeli-Palestine struggle is gaining momentum. Every time, it starts with the deaths of children on both sides.

On June 12, Thursday, three Israeli teenagers disappeared near
Hebron (West Bank). During a demonstration on May 15 Israeli
military shot two Palestinian teenagers.

There’s nothing new about involving children in this conflict, but the increasing number of
kidnapped and killed children usually precedes large-scale
conflicts. Here are some recent examples of how the death of a
teenager served as a trigger.

Deadly hitchhiking

The Israeli population lives under a number of strict rules. No
Israeli citizen can go to the Palestinian territories, hitchhike
or visit Palestinian homes.

Earlier this month three students from the Jewish seminary in
Hebron – Naftali Fraenkel (16), Eyal Yifrah (19) and Gilad Shaar
(16) – disappeared on their way home, having broken the rule on
hitchhiking. At least, that’s how the media describes it. The
police learned about their disappearance on Thursday evening. The
media reports that the police notified the army about it several
hours later.

The censorship that is as a rule inherently present in connection
with any events was less strict this time. There was a leak
saying that one of the teenagers managed to contact the police at
10:25pm and in a whisper told them that he was kidnapped, but,
according to the media, the police operator dismissed the call as
another teenage prank. An organization called Dawlat al-Islam has
taken responsibility for the kidnapping, but there are no
developments. That same evening Israeli official Gershon Baskin
said that the Hamas leadership knew nothing about it. Yet on June
15, it was Hamas that Netanyahu accused of kidnapping the three
teenagers.

“Today I can say what I couldn’t say yesterday, before the
arrests of Hamas members in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank –
RT) took place. The boys were kidnapped by Hamas, the very same
Hamas that Abu Mazen created a national coalition government
with. This will have serious repercussions,” said the Prime
Minister, opening a government session on Sunday.

Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri claimed that the organization
had nothing to do with the kidnapping, calling the accusations
“nonsense” and “a bluff.” The Palestinian
authorities on the West Bank said that they can’t guarantee the
safety of Israeli settlers. Mahmoud Abbas’s aide Muhammad
al-Madani said Netanyahu was taking advantage of the situation to
generate more tension.

Then the army began a search and found a burned car that they
identified as the kidnapper’s car. Following this, 16 Hamas
members were arrested in Hebron; over the next few days, the
number of arrests reached 80. The Israeli army started bombing
the Gaza Strip, while Egyptian authorities called on Hamas and
Islamic Jihad to explain the situation.
In Hebron, Palestinian teenagers threw stones at the Israeli
forces by the Cave of the Patriarchs. Later, about 2,000 Israeli
soldiers were sent there as reinforcements.

The Israeli side is convinced that the kidnappers intend to
transport the teenagers to the Gaza Strip, so the checkpoints and
border patrol are on high alert. It should be noted that walls
were built along only some parts of the border, most of it is
only equipped with wire fences, minefields, watch towers and 24/7
monitoring systems.

Deadly games with stones

May 15 is the Nakba Day for the Palestinians, the day of their
displacement back in 1948. This year, it ended in the murder of
two teenagers, Nadeem Siyam Nawara (17) and Muhammad Mahmoud
Salameh Abu Daher (17). Both were shot through the heart near the
Ofer prison in the town of Beituniya.

On May 19, Defense for Children Palestine published a two-minute
video of the shooting using CCTV camera footage. It shows two
youths walking and then dropping to the ground. Based on the
entry and exit wounds, the Palestinian side and Israeli human
rights organization B’Tselem argued that it was live fire opened
up from more than 200m away that killed the two teenagers and not
rubber bullets. The human rights advocates underlined the fact
that at no point were security forces endangered by any of the
victims, so their actions cannot be justified as a response to
provocation.

Fahad Zaid, the owner of the building with the CCTV cameras, said
that he heard four gunshots coming from the opposite direction of
where the boys were throwing stones. According to him, the army
used gas first, the youths stopped throwing stones and retreated
to a nearby petrol station, and after that the bullets hit their
targets.

The military press service claimed that special equipment, not
firearms, were used to disperse the demonstration. Moreover, the
officials doubted the authenticity of the video, calling it a
biased editing work.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said that the video was
“edited”. The official version of the events goes like this: 150
Palestinians were commemorating the Nakba Day, throwing Molotov
cocktails, burning tires and stones at the Israeli soldiers, but
no guns were used in response.

The Israeli army announced a “partial investigation”,
while the UN urged Israel to conduct an independent investigation
of murder and disproportionate use of force.

‘It doesn’t look good’

In January 2013, two Haaretz journalists, Gideon Levy and Alex
Levac, studied murders of children during protests, in particular
the death of a 16-year-old from Budrus.

The following is how the journalists described the life of the
Palestinian youth in Budrus: the Palestinian village borders an
Israeli settlement; there is a separation barrier consisting of a
high wall, a barbed wire fence and an electronic security system.
Palestinian children come to the fence every day calling Israeli
soldiers cowards and throwing stones at them. Penetrating the
first line of defense is considered a special brand of cool.

As a rule, the journalists suppose, this behavior does not have
any serious ramifications. But that day, soldiers set up an
ambush, with one group hiding in the bushes and two more soldiers
in the trenches by the wall.

The question of whether it’s okay to ambush teenagers is not on
the agenda, since any Palestinian who violates the borders and
rules established by the Israelis unilaterally is considered a
trespasser regardless of their age.

When Samir Awad, 17, crossed the separation barrier, they fired
in the air. The youth tried to flee to the village, but was
wounded in the leg while crossing the barrier on his way back.
The soldiers in the trench grabbed him, but he managed to free
himself and continued to run. It was then that they shot him,
running away, in the back and head.

Residents of Budrus told the journalists how they helped an
Israeli soldier who accidentally strayed into the village about a
year ago to get out of there safely. “And that’s how they
paid us back for it,” they concluded in their interview with
Haaretz.

The Army command qualified the incident as preventing an attempt
to infiltrate into Israel. Later on, as the investigation
progressed, the Army reported that the soldiers’ witness accounts
do not add up. Still later, an officer told the journalists that
“the story doesn’t look good.”

Israeli media believe that this “children’s war” has
been going on forever, with Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks,
and with young draftees , only a few years older, holding
firearms in their hands on the other side, supported by their
army and government . And so that’s how it ends up – the soldiers
get to respond to these provocations with lethal weapons.

On the day the journalists visited Budrus they watched the late
Samir’s brother go to the separation barrier to challenge the
soldiers. In response, they threw tear gas grenades.

This is only one case that has received so much attention. There
are dozens of protests like this taking place daily, and
retaliation by force does not seem to succeed in stopping it. The
Palestinians only keep growing more bitter and desperate.

This happens everywhere. In November 2013, a Palestinian teenager
attacked an Israeli soldier with a knife in the north of Israel.
The soldier died from the wounds; the 16-year old attacker from
Jenin (West Bank) was arrested. According to the media, he had been working in Israel
illegally. He is facing at least one life term for the murder,
whereas his brothers may well be expected to plan and carry out
more revenge killings.

How to help solders get over it

Scandalous revelations by Israeli Major Elena Zakusilo (Gluzman)
shed light on how Israeli soldiers are trained to counteract
Palestinian protesters, including children.

In her appearance on the Ukrainian TV show “Lie detector” on
November 4, 2013, Elena confessed to having fired at minors.

Her job with the Israeli Army is to train army dogs for raids
against Palestinians. During the protests of 2004 that were
triggered by Yasser Arafat’s death she had to fire at protesters.

Elena related how her fellow officers helped her fight the
psychological barrier and the doubt about what she was doing.
Her rugged yet friendly commander, a general, gave her advice to
accept the idea that the order to attack means exactly to follow
the order and fire not thinking about who or what the target was.
She explained further that all other emotional reactions of a
soldier are given full and proper consideration saying, “If
you come to your commander and say, for instance, that you
accidentally hit a cat while driving or saw someone get hurt and
you feel bad about it, he’d talk to you for hours to help you get
over it.”

Elena’s job is to train dogs. She has trained 150 of them so far.
“I want to return to Israel and continue destroying the
enemy,” she said.

The major explained in detail what kind of training she gives the
dogs: “A dog is fitted with an electronic collar which has an
inbuilt camera; the operator in charge of the dog has the remote
control which can make the dog attack a target by sending the
signal from as far as 10 kilometers away."

Elena’s mother, who also participated in the program, said that
she supports her daughter and understands that murder is part of
the job. “Of course, this is the Army,” said she.

Children under fire

For decades, the number of reports about outrageous acts of
violence has grown so much that it does begin to raise doubts
about whether they have any value.

The Israeli side’s arguments boil down to the claim that the
Palestinians do not value their own children and push them to the
battle line themselves.

The majority of Palestinians I have talked to have been arrested
as children for throwing rocks at the soldiers.

The warden of the St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza, an Orthodox
Christian, told me that boys feel it is their duty to take part
in the acts of protest, regardless of their religion, social
standing of their family or wealth. This is how they grow,
generation after generation.

According to the Save the Children reports between 23,600 and 29,000 children
required medical assistance for wounds and injuries from beatings
and gunfire during the first two years of the First Palestinian
Intifada (1987-89), a third of them were minors under the age of
10.

During the Second Intifada (2000-2004) the Israeli Army killed
500 children, and left 10,000 injured. The Second Intifada
literally began with the killing of a Palestinian child Muhammad
al-Durrah. This was captured on a video, which the Israeli media
dismissed as fake Palestinian propaganda.

146 Palestinian children died in the course of anti-Palestinian
operations undertaken in 2006-2007.

In December 2008-January 2009, the operation against Gaza took
the lives of 1400 Palestinians, 312 of them children.

These killed children either remain nameless or, at best, get
reported as a casualty in a news ticker. Only seeing how the
tension builds up and how the mass-media start to spin these deaths can give the experts a
clue that we’re possibly nearing a full-scale war phase, with
hundreds and hundreds casualties.